Conventional few-product and large quantity production of chemicals, food stuffs, pharmaceuticals and the like, generally involves the use of vessels for agitation and reaction which are each connected up to respective piping. As a result there is the problem of laying a large amount of complicated piping, and of washing out the piping, as well as having to remove contaminants.
On the other hand, recently the demand for diversification and personalization of products has progressed and in order to meet this, the production of various companies has become much more diversified. The result is that, the conventional few-product and large quantity production type plants with their large amount of laid piping cannot deal with this, so that multi-product and small quantity/variable amount production has become the leading method.
That is to say, in order to meet the wide requirements of the consumer who desires a much more personalized functional merchandise than the conventional widely used merchandise, the merchandising concept is aimed towards personalization, high functionalization, high performance and high class, many brand of merchandise of which design and function is different even with the same merchandise are produced by using the large number of raw materials, and supplementary materials naturally, as well as using various types of additives and coloring agents, so that there is a strengthening in the trend towards a new demand for commodities.
Accordingly, even on the production site, it has become imperative to plan for production systems where production and stock management can be directly linked to market trends and which can respond quickly to product development, or production systems that are capable of excluding contamination in order to maintain quality.
In order to respond to these kinds of social trends and demands, development of multi-product and small quantity/variable quantity production systems has been progressing. At the present stage, production systems using movable vessels satisfy the above needs and there are said to be some very desirable production systems of high efficiency. A production system resembling this system has been experimentally adopted in part.
For example, a method for manufacturing paint is disclosed in published unexamined patent application number 60-186572 (1985), wherein a vessel for the production of the paint is loaded on an automatic guided vehicle and moved successively between stations provided with preparation process, mixing process and filling process. However, the disclosure in the unexamined patent application related to this technology, gives only a general outline with no detailed description, and there is nothing relevant concerning the operations of transfer, connection, and washing of the vessel which are essential technology for a movable vessel type production system of this type. In a related system there is a large difference in performance depending on the actual construction of the transfer, connection and washing equipment, and improvement in this system is accompanied by many problems.
For example, in the above publication, a conveyor system drive equipment is adopted as a means for transferring a tank from an automatic guided vehicle to a station, and returning the tank from the station to the guided vehicle. However, positioning equipment is not touched on. With a conveyor system, the accurate positioning of a heavy tank is generally difficult. Further, even with accurate positioning, in the case of an arrangement involving a plurality of stations and movable vessels, for the connections to have complete interchangeability, precision is required. Therefore, if the automatic connecting equipment does not have an alignment adjustment mechanism, piping and power connection is not possible. Accordingly, unit operations and control operations using the tank cannot be done.
Further, in this publication, no definite method for the cleaning of the tank is suggested.
In one example of conventional technology in the published disclosure, the volume of the vessel was limited to at the most one cubic meter, and so far the technology has not been established as a commercial production plant, and the use of the technology is also extremely limited. Therefore, at present, the production plant being based on the technology is not considered as equipment for wide applications. Further, reliably handling of dangerous fluids and automation of the complicated operation have not been sufficiently achieved, and in higher productivity there are many problems remaining to be solved.